On the doing of building work

A seemingly all-too-common misunderstanding about building work is that it is straightforward and simple, the corollary being that problems encountered in the production of the built environment are avoidable or mitigatable. Recent research reveals, however, that the opposite is true; the production of the built environment is complex, as is the industry that produced it, and the only certainty is that production will never play out in the ways in which it was predicted too. To deal effectively with the complexity of building, construction processes, as well as buildings themselves, can be conceived of as systems. Following the German sociologist N. Luhmann and modern systems theory more broadly, a complex systems perspective suggests that, far from being predictable and manageable, construction work is enacted across (and through) a heterogeneous constellation of loosely coupled sub-systems (e.g. organisations, materials, human actors, contracts, etc.) Workers cope with such complexity by combining established routines with emergent practices, some professional and based on years of experience and theorizing, other developed ad-hoc to respond to the emerging nature of what they confront. The tacit and embodied aspects of practice, while often taken-for-granted or overlooked in accounts of construction work, reflect the praxis of building; the ways in which knowledge – both tacit and explicit – are translated into practical action. In this paper, we mobilise a practice perspective in drawing upon ethnographic vignettes of construction work in order to construct a deeper understanding of building work from the perspective of those who do it. These reveal how unpredictability and uncertainty are routinely dealt with by workers and artisans employing what they know in (and through) practice. We argue that such perspectives provide fresh provocations and constructive input for thinking about construction work as emergent practice.